Untitled - Korn Ferry

by David Berreby
I L L U ST R A T I O N S b y M A R C O W A G N E R
THE OPTIMISM-PESSIMISM CONTINUUM
ONCE,
I suspect the answer is no. Science in the past 20
years has made it abundantly clear that the human
mind is not a clear pane through which we see reality.
It is, rather, a distorting mirror, thanks in no small part
to its optimistic and pessimistic impulses.
Few people, of course, are so purely, foolishly
optimistic as to think that nothing can go wrong,
and just as few live with an Eeyore-like insistence
that everything will. Rather, optimism is a sense that
the unknown problems of the future can and will be
solved. According to one leading psychological theory,
it is a style of thinking about adversity. The optimist is
prone to think that bad events are, first, generally not
part of a pattern, second, not caused by the optimist’s
own mistakes, and third, easily compartmentalized (in
other words, when the car breaks down, the optimist
doesn’t assume this means the rest of the day will go
sour). Conversely, real pessimism is the conviction that
none of this list is true.
All other things being equal, people have habitual,
temperamental tendencies toward one outlook
or another, about which they may not have much
control. (For instance, it appears that the likelihood
of scoring high on a widely used test of optimism is
partly genetic.) And that means, by definition, that we
are ignoring reality, applying our preferred outlook to
new situations, rather than judging each on the merits.
Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t do that—if we could
use a drug, or judicious zaps to the brain, to eliminate
these distortions? Wouldn’t it be great to see through
the window into the future as if it were a distortionfree glass of crystal-clear water?
The answer is well established by research on the
basis of decision making in the brain—thanks to
studies of unfortunate patients who have brain damage
in the ventromedial frontal lobe, a region necessary
for making us aware of our emotions. They are free
of the highs of optimism and the lows of pessimism,
and their lives don’t work. For example, after a tumor
damaged the ventromedial region in the brain of one
formerly successful businessman, he lost his marriage
and his job. As one of his physicians, the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio, has written, the man’s brain worked
normally in all other respects—so well, in fact, that he
couldn’t obtain disability payments—but his lack of
I had high hopes for this
article. As I began work on it, I
thought it would be compelling,
insightful and influential. Then
I hit some bumps, then a few
more, and the day came when I
began to feel I might barely get
through it. Why, I wondered,
did I take this thing on?
I’d been optimistic at the
outset. Then, I’d gone overboard
in the other direction.
Now, at the end of the project,
both the up and down swings
look like kind of a waste.
Producing this article could
have been achieved in less time,
and with less stress, without
spending emotional capital on
those highs and lows. And yet,
has anyone reading this—or any
organization to which they’ve
belonged—gotten through a
project without these waves of
overly rosy and overly gloomy
intuitions?
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"Perhaps we are inclined to ignore the
odds against us because we, like all living
creatures, have already beaten tremendous
odds. We did it just by existing."
THE OPTIMISM-PESSIMISM CONTINUUM
highs and lows made him seem “an uninvolved spectator” in his own life. Without such feelings to focus his
attention, he would spend hours deciding what color
pen to use, or where to eat his lunch. Unmoved by his
own unraveling, he simply watched with mild interest,
as if it were happening to someone else.
The lesson here is clear: We can’t sustain our
plans and projects if we’re disconnected from our
passionate and distorted perceptions about their
future. So even if a pill should come into existence
that would allow you to disconnect from the ups and
downs of your feelings about the future, you would
be foolish to take it. Contending with our conflicting
waves of optimism and pessimism is an inescapable
part of planning for the future. As we cannot do
without them, we’d do well to try to harness their
benefits and minimize the damage they do.
Half of this case is easy to make: Convincing
human beings that they need optimism has never been
difficult. A conviction that one can beat unfavorable
odds seems to be baked into the human psyche. After
all, worldwide, lotteries collect the equivalent of
$275 billion annually, even though any rational person
would describe them (as one rational person did) as “a
tax on people who don’t understand probability.”
Perhaps we are inclined to ignore the odds against
us because we, like all living creatures, have already
beaten tremendous odds. We did it just by existing.
In a universe with plenty of barren rocks, we live on a
planet capable of supporting life, which actually has
living creatures on it, some few of which are pretty intelligent—something 4 billion years of evolution never
managed before us. All very unlikely success stories.
And what is true about our species is also true for
any individual human being. At the most literal level,
the odds are always against any particular egg being
fertilized and growing to become a healthy newborn.
And the odds of any particular sperm cell reaching its
goal are infinitesimally low. That you exist to cherish
a certain mad optimism is a sort of proof that mad
optimism can be justified.
Some medical research suggests that optimism
accords with our biology. People who score high on
standard psychological measures of optimism tended
to have healthier diets, have lower Body Mass Index
scores, lower blood pressure, blood sugar and choles-
terol, according to a recent study in the journal Health
Behavior & Policy Review. Optimists are also known in
the epidemiological literature for getting fewer colds
and suffering less from flu. When they get cancer, they
tend to have better outcomes. As friends, neighbors
and colleagues, they are supposedly more pleasant and
productive—“happiness magnets,” as the former Olympian Mary Lou Retton puts it.
Yet a closer look at the science makes it clear that
optimists have—surprise, surprise—overstated their
case. Pessimists (if they thought it would do any good,
which they might not) can offer their own studies to
counter each point about the merits of the rosy view.
Health benefits? A very long-term Stanford University study of 1,528 people over eight decades was able to
track the entire lives of people whose relative optimism
and pessimism had been assessed when they were children. It found that the children who scored highest in
optimism were the soonest to die as adults. Similarly,
a study in the journal Psychology and Aging, reported
last year in The Wall Street Journal, found that people
older than 65 who expected to be less satisfied with
their lives in five years were more likely to be alive and
healthy years later, compared to those who were more
optimistic. Better work and better friendships? Not
necessarily, when the going gets tough. When events
fail to confirm their outlook, optimists cope with the
stress of adversity less well than pessimists, according
to a host of studies. One likely reason: Pessimists aren’t
easily disappointed.
Even if there is no clear verdict about which outlook
is healthier, there is still a widespread prejudice that
optimism makes for better friends, neighbors and
co-workers. Are there any reasons you might prefer
engaging with gloomy Gusses rather than people of
cheerier outlook?
As it happens, there are. One is rooted in the
fact that pessimism isn’t merely the absence of optimism—it is its own mode of thinking and feeling
about the future. One that offers some strengths that
optimists lack.
By dint of their uncertainty that they can prevail
over future challenges, pessimists tend to worry. As
they game out potential failures, they can be more
likely to imagine solutions. In other words, while
optimists on a team will expect solutions to arise if
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THE OPTIMISM-PESSIMISM CONTINUUM
needed, generating those solutions may require a few
pessimists who actually thought in detail about how
to handle trouble. According to Adam Perkins, a psychologist at King’s College, London, the pessimistic
tendency to imagine threats is a natural spur to
thoughts about how to meet those threats—in other
words, to creativity.
Other psychological research aligns with his theory
of a link between angst and performance. Experiments
conducted on students—some as young as 6 and 7,
some in college—continually find that those who have
been lulled into a happy mood score lower on tests and
games than do those who have been made sad or angry
just before the exercise.
cost overruns ran an average of 45 percent. As Kahneman notes in his summary of his work on human bias
and error, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” these data are
striking because they cover three decades. They show
that two decades of experience in railroad projects
since the late 1960s did not improve the forecasting of
projects started in the 1990s. The planning fallacy is
as much a component of our personal lives as it is of
our work. As Kahneman recounts, in 2002, a survey
of American homeowners who had remodeled their
kitchens found that, on average, they had expected the
job to cost $18,658; in fact, they ended up paying an
average of $38,769.
There are two types of errors in thought involved
in these pratfalls of optimism. One is giving too much
weight to social factors: We human beings are highly
alert to the way others see us, and in convincing onlookers that we are skilled and efficient, we convince
ourselves all too easily.
And often organizational politics adds its weight as
well. As an acquaintance told me recently, discussing
meetings about his construction work for a big urban
government, when confronted by the boss’s grand but
impossible vision, direct reports faced a choice: They
could say “it cannot be done,” and earn a lot of ill will
from their superior. Or they could say “yes, indeed!”
and later report that they failed—which earns them a
pat on the back for at least having tried. As the project
planning wore on, he said, everyone involved learned
that the second option was the only safe choice.
Aside from pressure from others to be too optimistic, there is a second source of error in optimistic
assessments. It is, simply, making plans using the
wrong frame of reference. To estimate future costs
in money and time, your project should be compared
objectively to others like it. Instead, people tend to
compare it to the last one they personally worked on,
or to those that seem to them to be similar. If that
comparison yields an unacceptably gloomy projection,
they then look for reasons why, to use a familiar jingle
beloved of optimists, “This time is different.”
The cure for all this is simple: Request—and heed!—
someone who has no incentive to misjudge the future.
Planning needs an outside observer who has no stake
in being admired, liked or rewarded, and has no cherished notion about why this project is special and no
hese results suggest that overconfidence
arising from optimism leads people to skip the effort
they need to anticipate and solve future problems. But
the problems of optimism may run deeper than lack of
interest in details. When they do settle down to predict
how the future will treat them, optimists often fail to
engage reality—even when they have experience to
guide them.
This is because our innate tendency to prefer rosecolored glasses causes us to think our goals can be met
more easily than they can be in reality. In fact, the reliable tendency of estimates to be too rosy has a name,
coined by the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel
Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky: the
“planning fallacy.” This is the almost unavoidable tendency of organizations to underestimate the amount
of time and money required to complete a project, due
to an optimistic take on potential future problems and
the organizations’ own capacities.
For example, Kahneman has noted, among rail
projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998,
estimates of the number of passengers who would use
the system were on average 106 percent too high, while
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"We human beings are highly alert to
the way others see us, and in convincing
onlookers that we are skilled and efficient,
we convince ourselves all too easily."
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"Optimism is a happiness
magnet. If you stay positive,
good things and good people
will be drawn to you."
—Mary Lou Retton
THE OPTIMISM-PESSIMISM CONTINUUM
knowledge of your team’s last success story. The cold
eye of the outsider, using the correct reference class to
make comparisons, is much more likely to be accurate
than the “inside view.”
This is easy to say, but social pressure and habits
of thought incline us to resist or suppress the “outside
view” of our plan. In a project Kahneman himself
worked on, one team member with a great deal of experience had projected that the work would take seven
to 10 years. But before Kahneman had prompted him
to bring his knowledge to bear, the very same man had
estimated that the work would take around two. In this
case, a team member needed help from others to see his
own “outside view” clearly.
Then came the unpredictable events that dog
every endeavor. Some were directly related to the
work: Bomb-proof syncing of the app’s complex files,
which users would need to switch between computers
and mobile devices, proved much more difficult than
anyone expected. Others were the sorts of curveballs
that pessimists are sure will come and optimists think
they’ll handle if and when necessary. In this case, the
iOS developer hired for the project developed serious
health problems, but didn’t want to admit defeat.
In retrospect, Blount reflects, he should have separated from the developer and found someone else. But
optimism—intellectual, emotional and social—held
him back. “The person wants to do it,” he says. “You
want to give them that chance because you’ve got a
personal relationship with that person. And they know
the project really well at that point, so you’re kind of
hoping they can get past these problems.”
The iOS app had to be delayed. Adding to the
stress, some potential users complained—some to
tech support staff that should have been spending
their time on users’ issues with the Mac and Windows
versions of the app.
A second developer came on to the project, then
“hit a brick wall,” Blount recalls, and, again, was kept
on too long. Much as we look to leaders to optimistically inspire us, he has concluded that there are other
times when leadership requires insisting on pessimism.
“That’s part of being the big bad boss,” he says. “Being
the person who says, ‘This isn’t going as well.’ It’s hard
to be that person when sometimes you need to be.”
Now, three years later, Blount is on his third developer and finally testing a product. However, he says,
the company’s stance is now “we’re not going to make
guesses about when it will be released, it’s just going
to be finished when it is. We’re on that swing of the
pendulum now.”
Of course, he reflects, he could have simply announced nothing and kept the iOS project a secret.
However, in the software universe, “if you do that
people think you’re not working on anything at all.
People can be equally frustrated by that approach.”
The dance of optimism and pessimism, both in one’s
own head and organization and in what one tells the
public, is not easy to maintain. Both outlooks have their
uses, and either, applied wrongly can sink a project. It is,
as Blount says, “a really difficult balance.”
then, can you leverage the benefits of each
outlook on life without succumbing to its ill effects?
It’s a tricky challenge in management, both for yourself and your team.
Consider the experience of Keith Blount, creator of
Scrivener, a writing app beloved of novelists, bloggers
and scholars for its writer-friendly features (full disclosure: this article was created on the app). Begun as a
personal project about 10 years ago, Scrivener launched
as a commercial product in 2006, and Mac and then
Windows versions of the app did well for six years. But
by 2012, with the world going mobile, Blount decided it
was time to create an iOS version.
He knew this would be a big project — it involved
not only translating the app into a new operating
system but also creating bomb-proof syncing for very
complex files. He knew that the Windows version
of the app had taken two and a half years to perfect,
even though developers had told him it would take
six months. (“Whenever you speak to a developer
they say, ‘I can do that in six months, easy,’ ” he says
wryly.) He optimistically announced that the iOS version was in development, and that it would be ready
by the end of the year.
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